


The Colours in Her Hair (Don't Seem to Fade)

by orphan_account



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: Also her name is spelt Michal, Fem!Michael, Hidden Feelings, Highschool AU, Multi, Repeat: Michael is a girl, nerd!luke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-12 07:19:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Your hair looks like fairy floss," is the first thing Luke ever says to Michal.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>Or, the one where Luke has a black ring in his lip and rips in his skinny jeans, and Michal has her coloured hair and her shirts for bands no one has heard of, and between them they make the most passive-aggressive punk rock friends anyone has ever seen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Luke Meets Michal

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so my English Writers teacher told us to play our music, and to write a story based on the lyric it paused on when she told us to. Obviously, I was listening to Try Hard.

“Your hair looks like fairy floss,” is the first thing Luke ever says to Michal, and after his brain has caught up with his mouth and he’s seen the expression on her face, he blushes so hard he can feel his ears heating up. Squeaking slightly in embarrassment, he ducks his head so fast his shoulders nearly touch in an attempt to escape her intense gaze, and chews his lip ring nervously. He’s been asked to show her around the school, and had been planning on saying something witty and welcoming, but the first thing he saw was bright pink hair, and his mouth has always had a mind of its own.

It’s not like Luke says offensive things (the few friends he has are convinced he couldn't say a bad word against his worst enemy, not that he has one). He usually says innocent observations that sounds like compliments in his head, but apparently girls don’t like it when you say their accents are interesting before you’ve said hello, or if you tell them their eyes look like river stones before you tell them your name. He expects her to scoff, to be offended, to spend the rest of the day inching away from him just like all the other girls do once he’s let his mouth run away from him. Instead, she giggles, and it’s such a pretty sound he looks up.

“Thank you.” She’s smiling at him, and she holds a hand out.

Luke takes her hand, the cool metal of her many rings pressing against his palms, and shakes. “Your hair is really very pretty; I’m Luke.”

“Your lip ring is really very cool. Are you supposed to be showing me around? Oh, I’m Michal.” Her voice is soft, and a bit husky like she doesn’t use it very often. Luke thinks that’s a shame, because she has a rather lovely voice and he’d like to hear her read things to him.

He tells her this, and she blushes a little.

They’re still shaking hands, but Luke doesn’t think it’s awkward. He asks Michal if she does. She shakes her head, still smiling at him with her pretty green eyes and flaming pink hair.

If they spend the rest of the day holding hands, they don’t mention it.


	2. Michal Cuddles Luke

“Did you spill Blue Heaven ice-cream topping on your head?” Luke asks Michal the day she walks into school with new hair. He’s leaning against the wall outside the gate, waiting for her just as he does every morning.

“Again with the food?” she jokes, coming to a stop in front of him and self-consciously tugging at the almost blindingly blue fringe sweeping across her forehead. She knows he doesn’t mean it as an insult; the look on his face betrays his genuine concern, and she pinches his cheek. “I dyed it again.”

Luke doesn’t answer, he just blinks and takes her hand. “It makes your eyes look like the sea.” In the cool winter light, the whispy bits of hair that have escaped the gel holding Michal’s precarious spikes and waves in place glow like silver wires.

She laughs at him. “Come on, Blondie, let’s go to class; I’ve got Pokemon paused in my bag.”

Michal likes to play video games.

Luke finds this out when she sends him a text at three in the morning on Saturday asking him to come over. He’s bored, and it’s way too hot to sleep, so he walks the three blocks to her house and climbs in the open front window because he doesn’t want to wake her parents and he knows she’s too lazy to answer the door. She’s in the living room, bundled up in a sweater and a blanket even though it’s twenty degrees outside, but he doesn’t question it because she’s probably been there since Friday evening when it was much cooler and she hasn’t noticed yet. There’s a controller in her hand and something he vaguely recognises as Bioshock on the screen, and she barely looks up at him when she says hello.

Michal throws a controller at his head and points to the only part of the couch where her blanket hasn’t migrated to. “I’m going to kick your ass at FIFA, and then we’re going to cuddle,” is all she says.

Luke doesn’t find anything wrong with that, so he sinks onto the offered piece of furniture and tucks his feet under the edge of the blanket.

As they play, and Luke does indeed get his ass kicked, he can’t help but get distracted by Michal’s house. There’s nothing in what he assumes is the family room other than the couch and Michal’s own personal gaming studio. He mentions this briefly in-between rounds. She pauses the game and looks over, and Luke momentarily forgets his question because she has dark circles under her eyes and her hair is deflated and unstyled with the blue fading out around the tips. He thinks she’s beautiful.

“Mum and Dad aren’t around very much,” is all she says, and Luke accepts that because she has no reason to lie; who would he tell anyway?

Her parents are gone when they wake up at nine the next morning, cuddled on the couch like a koala on a branch, and the only thing letting them know Mr and Mrs Clifford have even checked in on their daughter is a yellow sticky note hanging off the controller that has slid to the floor sometime during the night. Michal whines and pulls the blanket over her face to hide form the light streaming in the window, and Luke yanks his arm out from where it’s jammed between his chest and Michal’s shoulder and unsticks the note.

He rests his elbow on the tuft of blue hair sticking out of the blanket burrito somewhere near his stomach and peers blearily at the bright yellow paper. _We’ll be back sometime around nine, there’s enough poptarts left for you and your friend. Don’t spend the day lazing on your arse and don’t break anything while we’re out._ _If you’re going to have sex with him, don’t do it on the couch._ Luke thinks that’s a pretty horrible thing to say to your daughter, and Michal’s expression when he tells her this over their cherry poptarts makes him believe it even more.


	3. Luke Stargazes

“I can’t see constellations in your hair.” Luke looks so upset when he says it that Michal can’t resist the urge to cuddle him.

“I told you I was basing it on galaxy tights, you silly thing. I didn’t mean I was dyeing it like an actual galaxy,” she laughs, ruffling his hair and nuzzling his temple. “Poor confused baby.”

Nevertheless, Luke spends the rest of the school day pawing through the kaleidoscope of pink and purple and blue trying to find patterns in the strands. Michal complains that he’s killing her hair style, and their teachers tell them that ‘this is maths class, not a hairdressing salon,’ but Luke is determined that he’ll find the Southern Cross if he looks hard enough.

Luke has a black ring in his lip and rips in his skinny jeans, and Michal has her coloured hair and her shirts for bands no one has heard of, and between them they make the most passive-aggressive punk rock friends anyone has ever seen. He’s the school nerd that people trip in the corridors, and she’s the weird new girl who has a tattoo and a Gameboy in her bag instead of makeup.

In their free periods, they hang out in the shoebox that the school calls a music room, and they hook up guitars and play whatever indie rock song was on the underground radio station the night before. There’s a senior boy who sits with them sometimes and beats out the percussion on a Cajun, and another who doesn’t actually go to the school but who always seems to be there, his bass guitar forever at the ready.

At lunch they like to sit in the shade under the science windows with their phones out, and sometimes Michal reaches up and picks the flowers the year nines are growing for their agriculture unit, threading them into flower crowns she makes Luke wear because they clash with her hair.

He wears them all day, and the girls gush and say that he’s such a good boyfriend while the boys snicker and say that his girl has him whipped, and Luke spends those days with a very confused pout on his face, because he and Michal aren’t dating. Michal just giggles and readjusts the flower crown where it’s drooping over his eyes. “If we were actually dating you’d know about it,” she says reassuringly.

He thinks this is a good answer, because Michal is very pretty, and has a lovely personality even if she tries to hide it behind vampiric behaviour and a rebelliously colourful exterior, and he would be sad if they were dating without him knowing.


	4. Luke Loses Michal

“Skunks are adorable,” it’s not exactly original, and would most likely be taken as an insult by anyone whose name isn’t Michal, but it’s literally the only thing that Luke can think of when Michal rounds the corner on the first day back after Easter Break and her hair is white with a black stripe all the way down the middle. He thinks momentarily that he has offended her, because she doesn’t laugh and pinch his cheek like usual. She doesn’t even smile at him, and then he realises that she hasn’t heard him, and the worry momentarily subsides.

He pushes off the wall and goes to repeat himself, but she turns her head and yells to someone over her shoulder, and Luke freezes when a tall, curly haired boy runs out from around the corner, and stops, panting, by her side. Luke frowns as Michal giggles and reaches a hand out to the boy, helping to stand him up straight. He chuckles deeply and pulls her in by the back of her neck for a kiss.

She barely looks at Luke as they walk past him into the school with their hands intertwined, and it’s so not like when it’s three in the morning and she’s too focused on her game to do anything more than demand he snuggles her while she beats his pride to the curb that Luke can feel something ugly twisting in his gut.

Michal comes into homeroom late, giggling and blushing and running a hand through her monochromatic hair. She sits next to Luke, and he breathes a sigh of relief because things are back to normal; curly head is in the year above them. He leans over to her and repeats his skunk line even though the moment has past, because he knows Michal will appreciate it.

A distracted blink as she flicks her eyes away from where she’s smiling at her phone and a lip twitch. That’s all he gets before she goes back to texting her curly head.

Luke spends half of lunch by himself under the science window before he sees Michal. She’s a long way away, heading in the opposite direction towards the footy oval, but her hair is unmistakable as she walks off with the curly headed senior. Luke pulls his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them, resting his cheek on top as he worries his lip ring between his teeth. He reaches up and picks the year nine’s flowers, threading them together into a dodgy flower crown. He looks at it and realises the red flowers would finally suit Michal’s hair.

He wears it all day, pretending everything is normal and Michal is giggling silently at him from wherever she is. By sixth period, he hasn’t seen her all day, spending his free period cooped up alone in the music room, and the flowers have fallen apart in his hands. It takes him that long to realise he’s jealous.


	5. Michal Comes Back

“Your hair looks sad,” is the first thing Luke says to Michal in three weeks.

He still waits for her by the gate, even though her boyfriend drives her to school. He still sits under the science window, even though she watches her boyfriend play football at lunch. He still stays up until three in the morning with his phone on his chest, even though she has someone much better she can call.

But, one day, today, she walks into school with brown hair. Plain brown. No stripes, no swirls, no tips. Just brown. People whisper, wondering what happened, and she looks so sad that Luke pushes off the wall and starts towards her, but by the time he’s halfway over, curly is already there, and he tells her she’s beautiful and that it suits her and that she should consider keeping it that way. Luke disagrees.

At lunch, he sits alone, as has become usual for him, and he half-heartedly plays Flappy Bird while contemplating the idea of making a crown out of the wilting flowers above his head. He’s just getting used to being by himself again, like he was before she came with her hair and her games and her friendship, when he hears running feet, and suddenly he has a lap full of sobbing Michal.

Luke doesn’t really know what to do as she wraps her arms around his neck and clings like he’s going to melt away when she bawls into his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the little cartoon bird hit a pipe and die, and he slings his arms around her waist and rocks her gently. When she’s just sniffling and hiccoughing into his collar bone, he rests his head on the chocolate hair that stills smells like chemicals and says it. He doesn’t think about it, he just lets his mouth go.

Michal lets out a watery laugh, and twines her fingers into the short hairs at the back of Luke’s neck. “All of me looks sad, Lukey.”

“Don’t be sad, Mikey,” Luke murmurs into her hair. “You’re too shiny to be sad.”

She’s really laughing now, shaking in Luke’s arms; her eyes are still leaking, but her cheeks are flushing for a happy reason and she’s giggling so hard she starts snorting and Luke has never heard anything better. “That doesn’t even make sense, you dork!”

Luke lets her cuddle him a little more before he asks her why. Nothing specific, he just opens his mouth and whispers “Why?”

Haltingly, she tells him that her mother actually looked at her that morning. “‘Now you look like a proper young lady; no man wants a girl who reeks of bleach day in and day out,’” she mocks to Luke’s neck. “Harry said that his parents didn’t approve of me because my hair made me look like a bogan, so I tried to change for him, but I can’t do it, Luke! I feel so plain and boring. I’m not plain and boring, am I Lukey? This colour is so suffocating! It’s like everyone is suddenly finding me, and I’ve lost myself!” She’s angry now, the hand resting on Luke’s shoulder clenching into a fist. “What do I do, Lukey?” Michal looks up at him imploringly, and her eyes are so green behind the flat curtain of brown that Luke gets lost in the forest.

“Be with someone who loves your crazy hair, and who loves your not-crazy hair. Who doesn’t mind that you spend all your free time with a video game controller in your hand, and that half the time you don’t know what day it is because you haven’t slept for two days,” he reaches up for a flower to tuck behind her ear because that’s a romantic gesture that always works in the films, right? But he gets a handful of wilting petals instead, so he shrugs and throws them over both of them until they’re giggling against each other. “Find someone who’ll play bad music with you, who’ll make flower crowns with you, who’ll love you for you and not what you look like.”

She huffs and drums her fingers on Luke’s chin. “Who would be stupid enough to do that?”

Luke is about to say ‘I would’, but he’s interrupted by a loud “Michal? Michal, where did you go?” and curly head, Harry, walks into sight.

Michal scrambles out of Luke’s lap, a guilty blush on her face, and raises a hand to brush the flower petals out of her hair as her boyfriend catches sight of her. Then, she freezes, hand still above her head, and looks back at Luke like she’s had an epiphany.

When Harry gets to her, he swipes her fringe out of her eyes. “So much more beautiful now,” he tells her.

She looks at him seriously and asks, “What day is it today?”

He rolls his eyes and begins to say “If you slept like a normal person, you’d know…”

Luke gets to his feet, taps Michal on the shoulder, and murmurs “Tuesday.”


	6. Luke and Michal get their Shit Together

“What does my hair look like today, then, Hemmings?” There’s a happy smirk on Michals’ face as she leans against Luke’s side where he’s in his customary position by the school gate.

It’s been a month since the Harry debacle, and Michal has kept the brown in, almost like she’s testing Luke; tempting him to tell her to dye it a different colour, going back on his word to love her no matter what she looks like. He never does though. Every morning, she asks him the same question, and every morning his runaway mouth comes up with something new.

Yesterday’s had been ‘A bar of Cadbury’s Top Deck,’ because her natural blonde was nearly to her ears, the brown just starting to brush her chin. Her fringe is getting ridiculously long too, touching her shoulder when she doesn’t pin it back.

But today, Luke is speechless.

She’s had a haircut, and it’s all fiercely spiked and styled to perfection. The blonde-brown combo is gone, replaced with every colour of the rainbow like Picasso himself did the deed. He can feel his jaw hanging open and his ears heating up. He tongues his lip ring and wets his lips.

“Well?” she says, nudging him with her elbow. A weird cracking noise he’s never made before bubbles out of his throat as he tries to answer her. Michal blinks at him expectantly. “Luke?”

Luke cups her face and kisses her so hard her teeth knock into his piercing. She flicks her tongue out at it.

Pulling away, he rests his forehead against hers. “I love you.”

She giggles and blushes. “I love you too. But, hair?”

“Beautiful,” he says, still with his hands on her face. “Your hair is beautiful, it always is. Change it, don’t change it. I missed you, I love you. I don’t care what your parents say; what anyone says. Michal.”

He’s babbling, she’s laughing, and her hair is shining in the sunlight, casting red and blue and green shadows over their faces. In the distance, the final warning bell for homeroom rings. Michal takes Luke’s hand like she’s never let it go. “We’re gonna be late!”

He runs a hand through her hair, bringing her in for one more kiss. “Beautiful,” he says again.


End file.
